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Shine, Darling


Ella Frears - 2020
    They are as insistent as they are circumspect, drawing close to the reader’s ear and bringing them into confidence. The engine of Shine, Darling is one of strength, of fortitude in confronting and surviving the world, of a lifted-chin audacity – ‘There was pain,’ the speaker allows, ‘but it was not new pain.’ Frears’s work is world-weathered rather than world-weary, delighted by service stations, fucking on bins in Cornwall, in constant communion with the moon. It lives for the power-play of people, of the pull of the sea, the smoky air – ‘Stormy, sticky with flies’ – and tangled underbrush where the land ends. Her characters test each other, experimenting with the boundaries of physical violence, of punishment, of traps, all the while drawing the reader into a complicity that gives these poems all their daring, electrifying muscularity. In Shine, Darling, the desire to expose and disclose wrestles with defence and defiance. The result is exhilarating, a ‘glorious full-bodied’ debut collection with the draw of an adamant tide. ‘Uncompromising, intelligent, surprising, accessible and sharp … These lyric poems have a clarity and straightforwardness that only a special kind of attention, and a certain kind of fearlessness can achieve.’ – Mark Waldron

Porn Carnival


Rachel Rabbit White - 2019
    White's deliberate, dominating voice evokes a Plath-like dynamism turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d'être, the bedevilments of a gay bitch on the pole.

Guillotine: Poems


Eduardo C. Corral - 2020
    Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.

The Arab Apocalypse


Etel Adnan - 1980
    Middle Eastern studies. Translated from the French by the author. Reprinted with a new foreward by Jalal Toufic. This book, a masterwork of the dislocations and radiant outcries of the Arab world, reaffirms Etel Adnan, who authored the great poem, Jebu, as among the foremost poets of the French Language. THE ARAB APOCALYPSE is an immersion into a rapture of chaos clawing towards destiny, and nullified hope refusing its zero. Is is also the journey of soul through the cartography of a global immediacy rarely registered by maps, replete with signposts like hieroglyphs in a storm of shrapnel and broken glass. And above all it is a book that, though capable of being read in its orderly sequence, has so surrendered to 'being there, ' it can rivet the sensibility to the Middle Eastern condition at any point in the text--so rapid are its mutations, so becoming its becomingness--like a wisdom book or a book of Changes--Jack Hirschman.It has a power and intensity that few poets today can muster--only Allen Ginsberg's Howl comes to mind.--Alice MolloyThe power of Adnan's language and imagery reminds us that she is indeed one of the most significant post-modern poets in contemporary Arab culture.--Kamal BoullattaTHE ARAB APOCALYPSE is, to date, Adnan's most triumphant battle with the exactness of words.--Douglas PowellThe poem invokes a mythic past of Gilgamesh, Tammouz, and Ishtar to presage a present that resists narration, THE ARAB APOCALYPSE contests an uncritical reflection on the immediate historical past.--Barbara Harlow

Say I Am You: Poetry Interspersed with Stories of Rumi and Shams


Rumi - 1994
    This collection features dozens of newly translated poems interspersed with legends and stories of their lives, presenting an intimate portrait of their communion and allowing readers to eavesdrop on their unique spiritual dialogue.

Heart Broken Musings: Rants | Poems | Quotes


Raunak Agarwal - 2020
    Because let’s face it! We hoomans are obviously stupid and trust me unicorns are never wrong. Did you know? The horn of the unicorn symbolizes ultimate truth and it has the power to pierce the chest of anyone who tries to lie. Damn!‘Uuuuuuuunicornnnnnnnnnnnnn,’ I yawned, waking up, after being thrown back to our crap-shit called Earth.‘So fellow hoomans, let’s begin.’About the book:This book is a sarcastic and humorous take on various themes like love, life, humanity, healing, and heartbreak - expressed through 51 beautiful chapters of relatable quotes, musings and poems. It basically deals with what we humans go through on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, every chapter is accompanied by a unique and perfectly orchestrated author's rant or opinion focused on one single person; You.

Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997


June Jordan - 1997
    June Jordan's many selves, as poet, essayist, feminist, and activist come together here in a collection of poetry that is alternately lyrical, magical, shockingly spare, pungently political, yet universally resonate. Beautiful love poems are interspersed with poems about Bosnia, Africa, urban America, Clarence Thomas, affirmative action, her mother's suicide, and Jordan's bout with breast cancer.This collection of poetry will be warmly welcomed by June Jordan loyalists and new readers who will thrill to discover a voice that has been described as one of the "most gifted poets of the late twentieth century."

Piece of Poetry : Me&Me


Raviraj Mishra - 2020
    We were made to sing and recite poetry in groups. The rhyming words somehow would bring a sense of enjoyment, and they won’t leave our mind even with the passing days. Poetry holds magic. A magic to change the moment and bring out the joyous hidden self. We all in some point or another had come across a poetry that either taught us the unlearned or brought back a memory or just a smile.Piece of poetry is an effort to share some thoughts through prose. Each poetry was written with a story in mind, willing to be talked about. The thoughts that didn’t need sophisticated words, but they were craving for rhythm.The idea was to point out some of the feelings and emotions that were desperate to be shared. Some untold words, a certain perspective that was always doubted by self and others. Piece of poetry is an honest attempt to format these feelings into a song, hoping that it would stick with everyone who decided to read it.

Leaving Yuba City: Poems


Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - 1997
    (Yuba City Poems).Groups of interlinked poems divided into six sections are peopled by many of the same characters and explore varying themes. Here, Divakaruni is particularly interested in how different art forms can influence and inspire each other. One section, entitled Indian Miniatures, is based on and named after a series of paintings by Francesco Clemente. Another, called Moving Pictures, is based on Indian films, including Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay" and Satyajit Ray's "Ghare Baire." Photographs by Raghubir Singh inspired the section entitled Rajasthani. The trials and tribulations of growing up and immigration are also considered here and, as with all of Divakaruni's writing, these poems deal with the experience of women and their struggle to find identities for themselves.This collection is touched with the same magic and universal appeal that excited readers of "Arranged Marriage." In "Leaving Yuba City," Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni proves once again her remarkable literary talents.

Texture Notes


Sawako Nakayasu - 2010
    Asian American Studies. Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's TEXTURE NOTES presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu's writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

Anodyne


Khadijah Queen - 2020
    Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

Illustrated Basho Haiku Poems (Little eBook Classics)


Gary Gauthier - 2011
    The paintings are in brilliant color and each features the Japanese parasol.Matsuo Basho (1644 - 1694) was born Matsuo Kinsaku during the early Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Basho was recognized for his work in a poetic form that was a precursor to the haiku. Over the course of time, Basho became recognized as an unparalleled master of the haiku. His work is internationally renowned, and his poems are reproduced at many historical sites in Japan.

Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One; Poems


Yusef Komunyakaa - 2004
    In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.

Boy with Thorn


Rickey Laurentiis - 2015
    The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.

A Place Called No Homeland


Kai Cheng Thom - 2017
    In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Thom draws from both memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk, Thom's debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.Kai Cheng Thom is a trans writer and performance artist whose work has been published in Buzzfeed, Autostraddle, Asian American Literary Review, and xoJane. She writes regularly for Everyday Feminism.